


Something Better

by domesticadventures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Headspace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 20:16:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4450742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domesticadventures/pseuds/domesticadventures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What do you want to be when you grow up, Mary?” her kindergarten teacher asks, looking over Mary’s small shoulder while she colors in a happy sun with a crayon.</p>
<p>Her classmates have drawn themselves as teachers, doctors, dancers, lion-tamers. One kid has drawn himself riding a dinosaur. Another has drawn herself <i>as</i> a dinosaur. Mary has dutifully drawn a clumsy smiling stick figure family.</p>
<p>“A mommy,” Mary says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Better

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Mary?” her kindergarten teacher asks, looking over Mary’s small shoulder while she colors in a happy sun with a crayon.

Her classmates have drawn themselves as teachers, doctors, dancers, lion-tamers. One kid has drawn himself riding a dinosaur. Another has drawn herself _as_ a dinosaur. Mary has dutifully drawn a clumsy smiling stick figure family.

“A mommy,” Mary says.

Her father frowns at the picture when she brings it home.

It doesn’t go on the fridge. It goes in the trash, like always.

\--

Mary asks for a doll for her eighth birthday.

_How very domestic,_ her mother says. Mary understands it’s not a compliment. They want her to ask for weapons, she knows. But her parents have plenty of those, knives in places other than the kitchen, guns not locked in safes, more matches and lighters and torches than anyone should need. She knows where to find them; they’re not that well hidden. She neither needs nor wants any of her own.

She already knows how to use most of them, too, can hold these deadly tools comfortably in her small hands. So young and she already knows how to destroy. She’ll be an expert at it before long, at the art of eradication.

But she wants to do something else. Something they haven’t bothered to teach her.

She wants to create.

\--

They scoff at her optimism, roll their eyes at her positivity.

She’s scorned for hanging onto her dream, for hoping for something else than this life of blood and rage and violence, this life defined entirely by death. They want her to be cynical. Always expecting the worst, always looking over her shoulder.

She refuses. She refuses to sleep with a gun under her pillow, to walk through life seeing a monster in every face. They think she’s taking the easy way out, giving up and going for the soft life, but she knows better.

She’s doing the hard thing. She’s turning her back on the darkness, baring her weak spot, walking forward.

She’s going to be something other than afraid. She’s going to be brave.

\--

When the yellow-eyed demon tries to take everything from her, she refuses.

He takes her parents, her boyfriend, everything she knows. He backs her into a corner. But he gives her a choice, and that’s all that matters.

She’s already mapped out her future, planned wedding receptions and researched school districts and chosen baby names. She can see it stretching out in front of her, this life she’s outlined, and she holds onto it even tighter than she holds onto the man she wants to be her husband.

She doesn’t make the deal for John. She doesn’t even do it for herself. She does it for the hypothetical child in whom she has already tied up so many of her hopes and dreams and expectations.

“Yes,” she says.

She does it for Dean.

\--

“I’m pregnant,” Mary tells a faded photograph of her parents.

She tries to imagine a world in which they lived to be grandparents. There would have been no flair in her announcement, no fanfare. She wouldn’t have crafted a dramatic reveal or bothered with ultrasound pictures. She wouldn’t have wasted any energy on it at all, wouldn’t have tried to make it anything more than the disappointing declaration they would have taken it for.

“You could have been a great hunter,” they would have said, instead of congratulations.

They would have been right, of course. She’s already a good hunter. Even now, all it would take for her to become a legend is her calm, obedient acceptance of the life she has been handed.

But she’s going to be something better.

 


End file.
